A man most Americans have never heard of — but who had a profound impact on our counry’s culture — has died.

From the Washington Post:

The Rev. George M. Docherty, the former pastor of the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church who delivered an influential sermon that led to the insertion of the phrase “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954, died Nov. 27 of a heart ailment at his home in Alexandria, Pa. He was 97.

Rev. Docherty (pronounced DOCK-er-tee) was summoned from his native Scotland in 1950 to become pastor of the historic church in downtown Washington, which Abraham Lincoln attended when he was president in the 1860s. Each year on the Sunday closest to Lincoln’s birthday, Feb. 12, the church had a special service that was traditionally attended by the president.

On Feb. 7, 1954, with President Dwight D. Eisenhower sitting in Lincoln’s pew, Rev. Docherty urged that the pledge to the flag be amended, saying, “To omit the words ‘under God’ in the Pledge of Allegiance is to omit the definitive factor in the American way of life.”

He borrowed the phrase from the Gettysburg Address, in which Lincoln said, “this Nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom.”

Rev. Docherty’s inspiration for the sermon came from his son’s schoolroom experience of reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, which was written in 1892 by Baptist minister Francis Bellamy. When Rev. Docherty realized that it had no reference to God, he later said, “I had found my sermon.”

Without mentioning a deity, Rev. Docherty said, the pledge could just as easily apply to the communist Soviet Union: “I could hear little Muscovites recite a similar pledge to their hammer-and-sickle flag with equal solemnity.”

In fact, Rev. Docherty first delivered his sermon in 1952, but to little effect. Other groups, including the Knights of Columbus and a veterans’ organization, had advocated a similar change in the pledge.

But in 1954, with Eisenhower in the congregation and the threat of communism in the air, Rev. Docherty’s message immediately resounded on Capitol Hill. Bills were introduced in Congress that week, and Eisenhower signed the “under God” act into law within four months.

Then as now, legal scholars questioned whether a reference to a deity in a patriotic pledge violated the First Amendment separation of church and state. In recent years, there have been several court challenges to the phrase.

But Rev. Docherty remained unmoved. The phrase “under God” could include “the great Jewish community and the people of the Muslim faith,” in his view, but he drew the line at atheists.

“An atheistic American is a contradiction in terms,” he said in his sermon. “If you deny the Christian ethic, you fall short of the American ideal of life.”

Continue at the link for more on his impressive life.

Photo: Rev. George M. Docherty and his wife, Sue, look at a display of photos celebrating the retired minister’s life, at Huntingdon Presbyterian Church in Huntingdon, Pa. Photo by Gene J. Puskar/AP